Andrew Dickson-Manitoba Pork:
We saw that on Country of Origin Labelling.
Small pressure groups were able to get the federal legislation changed which had a significant impact back at a state level.
There's not a lot of farm organizations from Canada get involved in dealing with their political counterparts in the United States and so we've tried to build a good working relationship with the pork producers in key states.
From that we can be sure that there's an understanding of how we do business in Canada.
It's not much different from how they do business in the United States and that we should be more focused on how do we open up international markets for our products.
For example Canada and the U.S,. need to be working together trying to open up the Japanese market and so on.
This is the sort of stuff that we try to encourage to talk about and that empathy that you can build will help build good trust relationships so that we avoid the almost continual history that we've had with trade conflict in Canada and the United States in the pig industry over the last 40 years.
Dickson says pork producers in Canada and U.S. are dealing with a range of common issues from managing disease to international trade.
He says the experience in dealing with Country of Origin Labelling has really brought the pork organizations in Canada and the U.S. together and is a good example of how industry can work with government on both sides of the border to resolve issues.
Source: Farmscape